The present invention is related to the field of data object processing such as in the context of displaying object data in a graphical user interface of an application.
Applications used for displaying or otherwise manipulating large amounts of structured data may employ a so-called “object model” representation by which the data is accessed. Object model representations are used, for example, in web-delivered applications and other distributed applications in which a local client device accesses the data from a remote server. An interface to the remote data may use the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture, identifying data objects as “resources” and hiding any details of a database or other specific data-storage mechanism from the application.
One need arising in applications of this kind is to apply filters to objects so as to return only relevant object data in response to a request, thereby making efficient use of available communications bandwidth. REST APIs commonly support filtering in the form of explicit filter expressions included as part of REST requests and executed by REST servers against a larger set of data objects. Filtering is based on properties/fields of the objects.
Typical databases used to store object data include rich functionality that supports both object-model structuring as well as filtering operations. Object-model structuring can be reflected in corresponding relational structuring of tables storing object data. Databases support powerful data manipulation operations such as “joins” that can be used to create filtered results.